The gun is the token of a terrorist's good faith

By Kevin Myers

12:00AM GMT 11 Mar 2001

'I STILL don't understand these people at all," a British Army officer who has spent his entire professional life studying the IRA told me recently. "I don't understand how they can do the atrocious things they do, I don't even begin to understand how they can starve themselves to death, and then blame other people. I don't understand any of it."

Such intellectual humility is a vital tool in coming to terms with that deviant sense of identity which finds expression in taking life. As Dingle Foot once said of Cyprus: "Anyone who says he understands the place has been misinformed." Real moral and intellectual comprehension of the unholy trinity of IRAs - Provisional, Real, and Continuity - is simply impossible for outsiders. But for those who belong to these armed cults, their worlds are self-explanatory, possessing an internal morality that is cohesive, clear and logical.

For members of the Real IRA, which bombed the BBC in London last Sunday, and nearly massacred two dozen soldiers in Londonderry two months ago, it is not necessary to justify terrorist deeds. Merely to have done them is justification itself. The act itself is the explanation. I do, therefore I exist, and so does my cause. It is existentialism taken to its absolute extreme; the political consequences of any random act of terrorism are not irrelevant, but they are secondary to the deed itself, which declares the terrorists' existence to be insoluble and non-negotiable until victory is won.

For the moment, the major threat to London, and to the unfortunate soldiers who remain largely incarcerated in their barracks in Northern Ireland so as not to antagonise the Provisional IRA, is the Real IRA. It might also be called the Hunger Strike IRA, for its moral impetus - and its members genuinely believe in the morality of what they are doing - comes from the sacrifice of the IRA hunger strikers of 20 years ago. In Real IRA minds, all other suffering is dwarfed into ethical invisibility in comparison.

The difference between the Provisional IRA and the Real IRA is really one of purity. For Real IRA, violence cleanses: it is without the moral compromise which results from the negotiation with the enemy, as the Provisionals have been doing. There lies its very virtue. To violate the taboo against taking life is a measure of a terrorist's commitment to his cause. It is a pure deed, and a wholly unselfish one, which will never, ever occasion the doer a moment's regret. For by that deed did he show how uncontaminated he was by compromise; by that deed did he redeem his terrorist soul.

To Real IRA, the Provisional IRA's project is contaminated by compromise. True believers do not offer their dogma up for analysis by non-believers, but proceed about their agenda, regardless of the cost to themselves and anyone else. And though the Provisionals scorn the Real IRA's belief in simple violence as naive, they fear Real IRA's purist charm. Whatever Bobby Sands died for nearly 20 years ago, it wasn't for Sinn Fein to help administer Northern Ireland within the UK, however subversively. The Provisionals thus face the dilemma of revering a man who preferred a terrible death to the sort of artful compromise they have accepted.

This is why the IRA's chief of staff. Brian Keenan, has been making such bellicose noises. It is why the Provisionals will not disarm, nor accept the new Police Service, which, after all, will be enforcing British law. The recently announced re-engagement with the arms decommissioning body under General de Chastelain is no more than the conman's flourish during the three-card trick. The general will no more see guns verifiably put beyond use than the dupe will find the lady.

Even without the Provisionals' own hardliners rejecting decommissioning, the mere existence of a purist Real IRA, with all its murderous allure, attracting more and more recruits, obliges the Provisionals to hold on to what defines them. The Provisional IRA's retention of its guns while Sinn Fein is in office could bring the Northern Ireland Executive to an end, possibly as soon as the general election. David Trimble might very well lose his seat because of unionist unrest at the absence of decommissioning. And then what? Then, God help us.